Saturday, June 17, 2017

I've been thinking quite a lot about sailing/cruising, boat design, and the fact that no one I happen to know is getting any younger.

What passes for design of boats that might be acceptable to folk of advancing years seems to fall in to two categories... Adding stuff that makes sailing easier and getting rid of the sail and selling folks on the idea of the wonderfulness of the internal combustion engine. Neither of which really solves the inherent problems that need solving but do make suppliers of consumerist goodies happy.

I get it. Designing a boat that is not a lot of excess work to sail, comfortable for a person of possibly less than optimum mobility, and comfortable is no easy task. Made all the harder because designing such a boat requires real skill and is akin to swimming upstream against strong currents of thought and moneyed interests.

Still, since a goodly number of boat designers are of "a certain age", you might expect a design or three to pop up once in awhile...